


Asterisk and the Separate Magisteria

by Audere



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23190967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Audere/pseuds/Audere
Summary: A young mage steals a fallen star, who asks him for a favor. He decides to oblige, because the task is impossible.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	1. Weightless

_ Falling. The star realized, with detached horror, that it was falling. It felt the icy, coarse air scrape at it, burning its surface and throwing light behind it in a glowing trail. It saw the Earth, which had seemed so small and unthreatening before, grow and consume its field of vision. It looked back to see its home getting farther and farther away, and knew that it would never, ever be able to return...  _

I was looking out the window of my father’s study, watching the slow turning of the stars, when I saw a line of white streak toward the horizon. And then there was a glow, faint but visible, shining at the edge of the sky where the line had gone.

I’ve always liked stargazing--since I was small, apparently. Enough that I was named for it. It’s one of the only ways that I can slow down my thoughts. I don’t do it for the heart-pounding action. What I’m trying to say is that I wasn’t expecting anything to happen. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see something flash across the sky, and then a spot of black where Proxima Kentauros was supposed to be.

I stood up, nearly knocking over my chair. I reached over my father’s desk, pushed a stack of books out of the way, and opened the window.

The glow over the hills in the distance was silvery, like starlight, and it wavered slightly. It was the wrong color for alpenglow, and anyway it was to the north, not the west.

I looked at the shelf by the desk, surveying book spines for something relevant. I couldn’t actually read their titles in the darkness, but I knew them by heart. There was an introductory alchemistry text which I remembered briefly mentioned spectroscopy, but that was it. I needed something more detailed.

I hesitated to move away from the window. A part of me worried that if I left it, the glow on the horizon would disappear. But I didn’t think that was likely. And the phenomenon was temporary, it was even more important to take measurements while it lasted. For that, I needed books from downstairs.

I walked to the corner of the study opposite the bookshelf, and stepped onto a bit of floor that a person would normally have no reason to stand on. It was awkward to apply the necessary pressure; I had to stand on one foot and jump a little, since I wasn’t heavy enough otherwise.

There was no click or whirr. The corner I was standing in descended soundlessly, and I was in the laboratorium. Cleanly-hewn stone was marred in places by chemical stains and scorch marks. The walls bore books, floor to ceiling, protected behind panels of mercuric glass. Two layers of books, actually, a second row behind each visible one, which I’d found annoying when I was young. Thankfully, these were more organized than the shelf upstairs, so I had no trouble finding several thick volumes on optics, astronomy, and spectroscopy. I would also need light to read them by, so I picked up a glowlamp from one of the shelves. I brought the lamp and books to the ascending room (well, ascending corner) which lifted me back to the study. Where it got its motive force from, I still had no clue.

I carried everything back to the desk and looked out the window again. The light on the horizon was still there.

I shook the glowlamp to get it started, and its yellow-green luminance grew bright enough to cast shadows around the study. I opened up the book on spectroscopy. It wasn’t a spellbook, but it explained things mechanistically. It would do.

I read it twice, paying particular attention to where the new information interfaced with the rest of my knowledge. I went over the edges of my understanding in my head, solidifying the shape of them, until I had something that would be safe enough to cast.

Then I walked back to the window, looked to the horizon, and spoke, outlining a rectangle with my hands as I did so. “ _ Diffractive spectroscope.”  _ A distortion appeared, which cast the distant glow into vertical lines. Lines entirely consistent with the spectrogram of a class Aleph star.

Which didn’t make any Gauss-damn sense, because stars didn’t fall. The celestial spheres were supposed to be  _ inviolable _ . 

I was so stunned that my hacked-together spell fell apart. Reflexively, I checked over my memory of it, which was mostly intact. As I'd thought, the work done by the spell was negligible. Still, unstructured casting was a bad habit to get into. In theory, each one would eat away at my general knowledge.

General knowledge that I was feeling uncertain about after having possibly seen a star  _ fall _ . I estimated my distance to the horizon as I walked downstairs and prepared to head out. From the altitude of my second-floor window, the curvature of the earth, a bit of trigonometria- coat, long socks, boots- yes, I could get over the horizon on foot, and my boots were on the wrong feet, and my coat was inside out. Multitasking was not my forte. 

I put everything on the right way. Then I checked over my math, which was off by a factor of four. Still a walkable distance, but it would take a while. I stepped outside. The front door creaked shut behind me.

“Where’re you headin’, Aster?” 

It was Timmon, the whitesmith, sitting on his porch at this ungodly hour. He fancied himself my guardian, or something, ever since I’d started living alone. He was an incredible hardass whose “kindness” tended to inconvenience me more than it helped. 

“Uh. I left my purse at the square today,” I said. I could head in that direction and then double back, out of sight.

“Not good for a boy to be out, this time of night. How about you get it in the morn? Nobody’ll take it or nothin’. All honest folk, in this town.”

“By that logic there should be no danger in me fetching it now, right?”

“En’t right for a boy to be out, ‘this time.”

There was no reasoning with him, really. I sighed and walked back inside. Instead of shutting the door behind me, I held it open a crack, and listened.

Footsteps, circling around. He was expecting me to leave from the back door. Because I’d done so, in the past, in similar situations. I waited for the footsteps to fade, and reached to open the front door again, but before I did I held my breath and listened for a few more seconds.

Whisper-quiet footsteps, heading back around to the front. He was trying to fake me out. Clever bastard.

Thankfully, I had a third exit. As I walked upstairs, it occurred to me to bring a few more books on optics and spectroscopy, so that I could take some measurements out in the field. I took a short detour through the study to do so, placing the tomes in my satchel-bag, and then walked to the upstairs fireplace.

It was late autumn, so I had a fire going, which I put out. There was soot all around and up the chimney, but I stepped in anyway. Getting dirty was a small sacrifice to make for a chance at a truly novel discovery. I looked up at the square of sky above, crouched down, and cast a spell. A proper one this time, the only one I knew, formalized variables and knowledge bounds and everything.  _ Levitate.  _ Weightlessness overtook me, and I drifted a finger’s-width off the floor. I pushed my feet down, and as they made contact, they launched me upward. My trajectory wasn’t perfect, so I got some soot on my back, but I made out and maneuvered myself onto the roof. 

The night air was still but clear, and all of the houses I could see down the road were dark. Something about the velvet silence made me want to run, and laugh, and see for myself what the hells was up with that silver glow.

So I did. I set off, bounding from rooftop to rooftop, my landings feather-light and feather-quiet. There was a chance I’d be seen, but I knew from experience that it was small. This wasn’t some northern city with glowmarks lining the streets; at this time of night, the darkness was like nanofelt.

As I reached the edge of town, I leaped over the wall. I touched down on an awkwardly angled rock, but the impact was gentle, and I pushed off again.

A force directly opposing gravity, distributed across every particle in my body, lifted me upward.

Alternatively, gravity itself was weakened. The gravitational constant was lower in the area of space that I occupied.

Alternatively, my mass somehow decreased without my inertia changing with it.

Alternatively, some aspect of the space below me warped, such that gravity treated me as much further away from the Earth than I was.

All of these interpretations were mathematically equivalent. All of this and more was contained in the elaborate construct of knowledge that was my  _ Levitate _ spell. With every leap, I felt a tug on my memory, but only a faint one; I had studied  _ Levitate  _ for years, and I could sustain it for hours safely. If I pushed myself too far, I'd have to spend weeks reviewing the spell, but it was hard to worry about that when I was having so much  _ fun _ .

As I sailed over creeks and hills and the occasional ravine, I remembered learning  _ Levitate  _ from my father. I’d spent a month studying, coming up with mnemonics, and solving exercises- and then undid all of that by jumping around the house and lifting furniture. Afterwards, I couldn’t even remember the inverse square law.

Since then, I had learned casting discipline, and barely ever used  _ Levitate _ . I’d forgotten how much fun it was.

The glow grew in the distance.

In what felt like no time at all, I came upon wide bowl of churned-up earth with something bright at the center. But I wasn’t the first one there.

There were two grey-robed figures, bent over the point of light. They spoke in hushed tones that I couldn’t make out.

A weight dropped in my stomach, and my Levitate spell collapsed. I’d been beaten here. So much for my dreams of a discovery that would immortalize me in history.

And the Collegium wasn’t known for publicizing its findings, to put it lightly. I might never find out what they learned from the star. 

But how’d they gotten here so quickly?

I peered over the edge of the crater and muttered a mnemonic from the optics text I’d studied earlier: “ _ Sir, eir, lir, luv.”  _ A series of distortions gave me a closer look at the robed wizards.

The one on the left bore a symbol of two intersecting circles with an eye at the center. A divinator, then. The other mage’s robes were embroidered with a distorted grid pattern: the mark of a dimensionalist. Neither bore any other markings- no box-and-arrow, no cells within cells, no molecular glyph- so they were specialized. Which made sense: a master divinator to locate the site with precision, and a long-distance dimensionalist to transport them there.

And they were still here, arguing about something. They hadn’t simply taken the star and ported back to the Collegium. So either they were relatively independent, and wanted to take credit for the discovery themselves, or the dimensionalist wasn’t up for a second long-distance porting spell.

Without any sort of conscious decision, I found myself thinking about how I might steal the star from two vastly more powerful mages. What tools did I have?

  1. Mastery over the Levitate spell, which would allow me to alter the weight (but not the mass) of a target.
  2. A few volumes on optics, which might allow me to throw together weak optical spells.
  3. The element of surprise.



I could Levitate the star into the sky, or make it too heavy for them to pick up… but once they knew something was up, the divinator would find me in an instant. I needed a plan that would prevent the mages from responding.

The dimensionalist pulled out a book and began to read it intently. His spellbook, most likely. That lent credence to the idea that he was too drained for a return trip. He must have been restudying his far-port spell.

When he was done, he and the divinator would take the star and leave.

On the other hand, the moment that they left would be the best chance to take the star. If I could keep the star here as the mages ported away, the dimensionalist wouldn’t be able to return without preparing his spell again. 

What form would the dimensionalist’s spell take? An instantaneous change in position? A temporary portal in space? If it was a portal in space, I might conceivably be able to Levitate the star away as the mages passed through, and perhaps it would close before they could retrieve the star… but that would be awfully convenient. They might bring the star through the portal first, or the dimensionalist might be able to keep it open instead of being trapped on the other side.

On the other hand, if the dimensionalist did something more instant, I might be able to keep the star from being taken along somehow, and then they wouldn’t be able to return.

How could I force that outcome?

As I pondered this, I saw the divinator approach the star and open up a dowsing compass. For a moment I worried that he would divine my presence, but his gaze moved only between the star and the compass. Taking measurements, most likely.

Which gave me an idea. I cast  _ Levitate _ on the star. Not to decrease its weight, but to increase it. Despite the name,  _ Levitate _ could do either.

The divinator did a double-take with his compass. He waved the dimensionalist over. They spoke more loudly in their confusion, and I could make out a few words.

“...weight fluctuating…”

“... no, the measurements … accurate … but constant mass?”

The divinator bent over and reached for the star. I intensified my spell. The star sank into the ground, and the divinator failed to lift it.

Exerting a force this intense was draining, but thankfully the divinator gave up after a few tries.

The dimensionalist said something vulgar and flipped to a different page in his spellbook. Preparing an instant transportation spell, hopefully. Since they wouldn’t be able to carry the star through a portal.

I grinned. But then the divinator shook his head, adjusted something on his compass, and muttered. Casting another spell?

The divinator’s eyes snapped toward me just as I ducked behind the edge of the crater. “Reveal yourself.” the divinator said. “There’s no point in hiding from me.”

I stood up and did my best to look sheepish and young. Should have seen that coming. What kind of divinator wouldn’t cast a couple detection spells in this situation? Really, it was a miracle that he hadn’t found me until now.

“Walk toward me, slowly.”

I did so.

The dimensionalist spoke. “Come on, Ell, it’s just a kid who thought he was spying on something interesting.”

The divinator narrowed his eyes at me. “Hm. How’d you find this place?”

“I live nearby. I saw the light.”

He muttered something and looked at his compass. Oh dear. He was probably discerning the truth of my words. 

“Did you do something to make that,” he pointed at the star, “heavier? Are you a kineticist?”

“Um…” I hesitated. “What’s a kineticist?”

The dimensionalist laughed. “Come on, Ell, let him go.” He stepped forward and waved his hand above my head. “See? No illusionry. He’s just a kid. Exactly what he appears to be.”

The divinator, apparently called Ell, sighed. “I suppose I must look rather foolish. Leave now, child, and say nothing of what you’ve seen.”

I ran away. Toward town, for a while. Then I doubled back toward the crater, stopped a ways away from it, and set up a series of reflective and refractive spells to give me a view from above.

All of this casting slowly eroded my knowledge of optics, but thankfully I had the relevant books on hand, and flipping through them from time to time as I maintained the spells was enough to counteract the memory drain. I adjusted my makeshift spell-periscope to get a closer look at the dimensionalist’s spellbook. It was all notation, too dense for me to decipher.

I frowned. Hopefully the targeting specs were strict enough to be fooled by what I had in mind. I dropped my concentration on the periscope spell and opened up one of the thicker optics tomes to its section on refractive indices.

From one perspective, it would be trivial… was it possible for the illusion to hold up from all perspectives? Perhaps with a curved interface between the mediums? I laid out some paper that I’d planned to record observations on, and started working out the possibilities. Hm. 

After an hour or so I had a spell-form that looked promising. I tested it on a pebble. The pebble, and an area of the ground around it, appeared to slowly shift and then stop a handspan or so from its original position. I moved my head from side to side, and the illusion held. I stood up, and suddenly the pebble appeared to stretch backward.

Hm. That wouldn’t work. I looked back to my calculations. Had I messed up an integration layer? I tried specifying the refractive gradation in a different way.

It occurred to me to check back on the two mages. It was hard to tell how much time had passed. Surely they hadn’t already left? But when I looked toward the horizon, the glow was still there.

I set up the periscopic spells again. The dimensionalist was still reading his spellbook. He was still on the same page, actually. No, that wasn’t right. As he flipped to the next page, and then skipped ahead a few pages, I realized that he must have been in the final stages of reviewing his spell.

I crept back toward the crater, lightening my steps with Levitate to make sure I wouldn’t be heard. By the time I got back to the edge, the dimensionalist’s book was closed, and he was speaking with the divinator, again too quietly for me to hear.

As the mages were focused on each other, I cast my new spell, taking care to evoke its effect gradually.

The star, and the space around it, appeared to move slightly closer to me. The distortion was gradual, and not immediately apparent once the spell settled into place.

The shadows cast by the star shifted, too. I hadn’t anticipated that. But the mages didn’t seem to notice. 

There was a tug on my mind, stronger than I was expecting, and I felt the spell slipping away from me. Why? None of the other optical spells had been a significant burden. Redirecting light should have constituted very little work.

Ah, but redirecting light directly emanating from a  _ light source _ , one bright enough to leave ghosts dancing across my vision, was probably a little more work. It was still just light, so any proper spell would have held up, but I wasn’t casting a proper spell.

I pulled out my calculations and read over them. They were already less familiar, like something I’d worked out last night instead of a few minutes ago. Trying to review them while maintaining my spell was like digging a trench in wet sand. 

As I read and reread what I’d written, frantically chanting mnemonics under my breath, I could tell I was losing ground. I could maintain the spell for perhaps a few more minutes before I risked drawing on knowledge outside of the spell’s boundary.

I spared a glance toward the mages. They were still talking. They didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, but they didn’t look like they were about to leave, either.

I lost track of one of the mnemonics I was using. What was Tsnelle’s law, again? I rederived it, only to find I had forgotten part of Higyn’s principle.

I looked up again, conscious of the fact that every moment not studying was knowledge lost. The mages were walking toward the star. The divinator had his dowsing compass open, but he was looking north, away from me. Some final checks on their destination, perhaps? I looked back to my notation, and it took a moment for me to figure out some parts of what I’d written. Had I really used theta prime, theta prime prime, and theta prime prime prime as variables? What was this, typographical number theory?

I still knew what my scribblings meant, for the most part, but losing track of details like that was a bad sign. Should I drop the spell? I thought back to the horror stories my father had told me about overdrawing. Ruined mages, perpetually confused about the world around them, missing their deepest intuitions about gravity or heat or light. The risk wasn’t worth it, I had to drop the spell-

There was a deafening  _ CRACK _ that sounded like a firecracker in reverse.

My concentration fell apart. I dropped my notes. 

The mages were gone. 

The star was not.


	2. Artifice

Ozzalus felt his spell boundary shudder, but not give, as the air around him changed. His eyes were closed. A bad habit, but it helped him focus while casting, and he found it unpleasant to see the sudden change in his surroundings during a port. He opened his eyes.

Ellarion was looking around frantically, eyes flitting back and forth between a spot on the floor and his dowsing compass.

The receiving room was empty, save for the two of them. The room was padded like a sanitarium cell, in case a port failed to compensate for momentum from a different latitude, and there was no furniture, to minimize the risk of intersection. There was also no star.

“Ell,” Ozzalus asked, trying to keep his voice calm. “What happened?”

“I-” Ellarion hesitated. “I don’t know.”

It was odd, Ozzalus thought, to hear those three words in Ell’s voice. “Did I make a mistake in the porting?”

“You didn’t. The bridge was clean, as was the severance.”

“Something with the targeting, then? I made the boundary as tight as possible to minimize the entropic cost. Perhaps I misjudged the star’s position?”

“You know as well as I do that your sense of space is impeccable.” Ellarion’s eyes were on his compass, but they weren’t reading anything in particular.

Ozzalus put a hand on his shoulder. “Ell,” he said. “We did nothing wrong. It’s an anomalous object, your measurements confirmed that. Most likely, it had some unforeseen interaction with my spell.”

“This was a mission from the Archmagister himself!”

“He’ll understand. There’s nothing for it, we’ll have to tell him that the star resisted the porting somehow. I’ll prepare a different spell as quickly as I can, and we’ll go back and get it.”

“All right. I… I’ll go tell him. You focus on memorizing your spell.”

“Are you sure?” Ozzalus was surprised that Ell had volunteered to deliver the bad news.

“Yes. I’m a divinator. Communication should be my responsibility.” Ellarion looked at Ozzalus, his expression suddenly firm, and walked to the door. 

Ozzalus didn’t object. Ell could get annoyingly stubborn about this sort of thing, but in this particular case he didn’t mind. He hated reporting to the Archmagister as much as Ell did.

He opened his spellbook and pondered what spell would be best for retrieving the star. If noncontinuous porting didn’t work, and it was too heavy to be carried through a Gate, perhaps a continuous warp? Ozzalus was the sort of person who worked well under pressure; he had little difficulty pushing the Archmagister and the consequences of failure out of his mind. He was nearly done with the memorization when Ellarion returned.

“You took a while,” Ozzalus said, not looking up from his spellbook.

“He… he recommended retirement, if we fail again.”

Ozzalus recited a few final mnemonics in his mind and then closed his spellbook. “Then we’d better not fail, I suppose.”

“You’re done already?”

“I  _ am _ the best dimensionalist in the Collegium.”

“Save for the Archmagister.”

“Save for him. Ready to go?”

“No. But we must.”

Ozzalus kept his eyes open this time. He and Ellarion arrived in the crater, exactly where they’d left.

The star wasn’t there.

Ozzalus blinked. Still not there. He waved his hand through the spot where the star had been…

Wait. Something wasn’t right. Something was off about his memory of the star’s position.

“Ell,” he said, “do you remember where the star was?”

Ellarion was sitting in the dirt with his head in his hands. He didn’t respond.

Ozzalus shook him. “Ell. Where was the star, exactly.”

Ellarion spoke quietly. “The geometric center of the crater. Obviously.”

Ozzalus knew distances, and he remembered them. When he’d tried to port to the receiving room with Ell and the star, he hadn’t targeted the exact center of the crater. He’d targeted a space twelve centimeters to the north of it. Where the star had been. He explained this to Ellarion.

“When I took my measurements, the star was at the exact center of the crater.”

So the star moved.

Or it had appeared to. While Ozzalus’s attention had been split between spell preparation and arguing with Ell. And neither of them noticed.

“Illusionry,” Ozzalus said.

Ellarion nodded. “That’s the only explanation. Illusionry. Optical illusionry. A subfield of kinetics…”

Realization seemed to dawn on both of them at once.

“You don’t think-”

“It couldn’t have been-”

“It was the kid,” Ozzalus concluded. “Remember when you asked him if he was a kineticist? He didn’t actually answer, did he?”

“Veritic spells don’t detect literal truth or falsehood. They measure physiological signs and use those to estimate deceptive intent.”

“But some kid who got his hands on a kinetics spellbook wouldn’t know that. And how clean was the reading, really?”

“Three to two odds in favor of sincerity. Or three parts sincerity to two parts deceptiveness, depending on how you interpret it. I… I thought he was just nervous. You’d have be a really good liar to pull off that kind of reading otherwise.”

Ozzalus sighed. “Well, he’s a very good liar.”

“You’re always telling me that I’m too paranoid. I felt silly, grilling a child.”

“I know. I don’t blame you. Neither of us were at our best. It was two in the morning. We wanted to get it over with. On any other day, I would have noticed the change in the star’s position, or you would have done a thorough check for illusionry before we left.”

“You’re right, this is my fault. As a divinator, it’s my job to make sure nothing slips past-”

“That’s not at all what I was trying to say.”

For a few minutes, neither mage said anything. The crater was vast, but it felt claustrophobic, now, as if its curved walls were rising up to envelop them.

It was Ellarion who broke the silence. “We’ll tell the Archmagister everything, and hope for leniency.”

Ozzalus shook his head. “We can’t tell him that we were duped by a ten-year-old hedge mage. He’ll retire both of us if we do.”

“He says all the time that he is fair to those who are honest with him. He has this whole game-theoretic thing about it, remember? Calculated incentives?”

“That’s just something he says. If we tell the truth, we’ll definitely at least lose our positions. On the other hand, we’ve just been reminded of how unreliable veritic spells are. On balance, I think the risk is worth it.”

Ellarion looked away. “If you say so. I trust your judgement more than mine, in situations like this.”

The two of them discussed their story, and how they would present it. Then Ozzalus ported them back. He walked into the Archmagister’s office first, Ellarion close behind. The office was a cozy place, with plush furniture and a fireplace set into one wall.

The Archmagister was standing behind his desk, rather than sitting, which was a bad sign. His eyes were soft and understanding.

“It must be some property of the star itself,” Ellarion began. “Ozzalus’s porting was flawless. When we returned, the star was gone, so it must have disappeared somehow in transit. I won’t claim to understand how, but from my measurements--”

“You’re lying,” the Archmagister said, gently, as if chiding a child. “I understand. Your situation must be very stressful. Nevertheless, please do not lie to me.”

Ozzalus evaluated the Archmagister. His hands were spread in a placating gesture, holding no divinometer of any kind. This was another one of his mind games; he didn’t actually know that Ell was lying. Ozzalus cleared his throat; he had to cover for Ell before he fell for it--

Ellarion spoke first, quickly and firmly. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Why must you break my trust in this way?” The Archmagister said, sounding genuinely hurt. “I try to be patient, but I must draw the line somewhere. Ellarion, you will retire.”

Ozzalus’s eyes widened. “It wasn’t his fault, it was mine, I should have noticed--”

The Archmagister silenced him with a cutting gesture. “It is admirable of you to try to protect your colleague, Ozzalus. I shouldn’t encourage it, but I am too soft for my own good. I will not punish you, as of yet.”

“He’s the best divinator the Collegium has! Now that we’ve lost the star, you need him more than ever.”

“You know our retirement procedure as well as I do. Ellarion’s talents will not go to waste. Do not try me, Ozzalus. You may leave.” The Archmagister sighed. His voice was heavy with regret as he addressed Ellarion. “You, on the other hand, I can no longer trust.” 

Ozzalus hesitated, and then left. He sat in the receiving room and waited for his friend. He could do that much, at least.

There was no sound from the Archmagister’s office. No raised voices, no hushed conversation, no shuffling of feet. Ozzalus remembered his first time there, all those years ago. “Don’t worry, nobody will hear us here,” the Archmagister had said. “I value the privacy of my students. You can tell me anything; none of it will leave this room.” Ozzalus had found it reassuring at the time.

He briefly considered rescuing Ellarion. He was a dimensionalist, after all; he could be in and out in seconds. Without time to prepare, another port would cost him years of study, but that was a small price to pay-

No. He had to cut off those thoughts before they grew. Thoughts like that were the reason Ell was being retired. How could he have been such a fool? How could he have thought they could fool the Archmagister? He’d grown complacent after so many years in the Archmagister’s favor.

Some time later, Ellarion came out, cradling his dowsing compass with both hands. Its innumerable needles, counters, meters, and wheels moved to and fro, but Ellarion’s eyes weren’t tracking them. They were vacant. Lost. Confused.

“What’s Beizs’ Theorem, Ell?” Ozzalus asked him.

Ellarion frowned. “Which theorem?”

“That’s not a funny joke, Ell,” Ozzalus said, disbelieving. “Let’s try something else. Repeat after me: expected value is the sum of possible values multiplied by their probabilities.”

“Expected something… something about a sum?”

“Expected value is the sum of possible values multiplied by their probabilities,” Ozzalus repeated.

“I didn’t catch that. You’re not speaking clearly, I think.” Ellarion sounded uncertain. “Is something wrong?” 

Ozzalus took the divinometer from Ellarion’s hands. It continued to move, measuring a thousand thousand things.

~~~

I surveyed the crater again, squinting past the light. Sure enough, the mages were well and truly gone. I didn’t know if they would get help from the Collegium, or if there were other dimensionalists capable of porting across long distances. I had to work quickly.

So I ran to the center of the crater and scooped up the star in my bag. I did my best not to touch the star directly; my father had taught me to avoid contact with exotic materials, both for safety and to minimize contamination. If I had a sterile container, I would have used that, but I hadn’t prepared one.

As soon as the star was secure, I began Levitate-leaping back toward town.

I lamented the conditions of this discovery. In an ideal world, I would have done testing on-site, or at least collected soil samples from the crater. But the most important thing now was to get the star back to the laboratorium. 

When I reached the town wall I weighed the risks of continuing to use Levitate. I decided against it. Leaping across rooftops in the black of night was a little dangerous, and carrying a glowing bag home would be a little dangerous, but leaping across rooftops with a glowing bag would be unexplainable. If someone saw me walking home, I could make up something about a problem with my glowlamp. Nobody here knew enough alchemistry to see through that ruse.

Thankfully, not even Timmon was out by this hour, and I made it home without incident. I allowed myself to relax a little as I descended into the laboratorium. The room was encased in layers of Phyrridae mesh, outside the anechoic stone, which would protect against most divinometry. I didn’t really understand how it worked. Even if the mesh blocked divinometry from outside, couldn’t a divinator simply find the mesh itself? Supposedly the layers were intertwined in a way that protected each other, and there was no “outermost” mesh, but that seemed topologically impossible.

I shook my head to clear it. I tended to get caught up in questions like that, sometimes, things that I didn’t understand yet. Thankfully, I had more pressing questions to distract myself with.

First I performed a more thorough spectrographic analysis. The equipment here wasn’t very portable, but I could use it without relying on spellcraft. My measurements were consistent with the initial spectrogram I’d taken from afar. However, there was one oddity. The star emitted light of varying intensities across all parts of the spectrum I could measure, including infrared, but it appeared to emit absolutely zero heat. Somehow, the light from the star didn’t heat things up when it was “absorbed.”

Next I measured its weight. Weights. It had no single consistent weight, which gave me a chuckle, because that meant the divinator’s measurements at the crater held some truth. The star’s weight didn’t fluctuate, but it seemed to depend on altitude, far more than normal matter, to the point where there was a measurable difference if I weighed it near the ceiling, as opposed to near the floor. My scales and force gauges weren’t precise enough for me to extrapolate a curve, but I suspected that at some height beyond the first celestial sphere, the star’s weight would be zero.

I took other measurements, thermal conductivity and voltaic charge and so forth, but I found little else that surprised me. A lot of zeros, which was interesting, but didn’t give me much to work with.

I couldn’t bring myself to test toughness or hardness. For all I knew the thing would shatter.

~~~

The next few days passed uneventfully. More tests, restudying optics, repreparing Levitate, sleeping at odd hours. The extent that I’d overdrawn on optics knowledge was a little worrying. My intuitions seemed intact, and I had little trouble relearning what I’d lost, but distribution of holes in my memory suggested that I might have lost a little from other fields as well. Overdrawing is rarely clean, after all. I reassured myself with the knowledge that it wasn’t permanent. Gaps from spellcasting could always be refilled, it was just a matter of time, I was nothing if not studious. 

I also worried about the Collegium. I was tempted to hole myself up in the laboratorium, since their mages could appear at any moment, but that would attract attention from the townsfolk. Instead, I spent some time each day at the Lifted Spirits. Despite being the only tavern in town, it wasn’t very busy, but there was enough chatter in the evenings that I could have an ear to the ground there.

It was on one of these evenings that a group of redeyed mercenaries burst through the door.

Liff, the barkeep, made an admirable effort to maintain his business smile, but his face was pale and there was tension at the edges of his eyes. I took my cue from him and tried to look blank. Normal. Was blank normal? What did my face look like normally?

What a stupid idea, spending time in the tavern. A tavern was the first place people came when they arrived in a new town. At least I was sitting in an innocuous corner. I watched the mercenaries without looking directly at them, shifting my gaze from time to time so that they were in the path of my saccade, a skill I was practiced at. I counted five total: two women, three men. All red-haired, of course, which was unusual; but they were also red-eyed, not in the sclera, but in the iris, which was distinctive of the Anthe. They were as lean and muscled as any laborer, but with unblemished skin, like nobles. Their clothes were practical but fine, armored in places with what looked like ceramic. They wore no visible weapons, which was surprising, but didn’t mean much, considering. 

One of the mercenaries, a lean, wiry man, walked up to the bar. “Has anything strange happened in this town recently?” He asked.

Liff did a sort of cross between choking and clearing his throat before speaking. “N-no sir. Not much happens in Ort. Nothing at all, really.” He chuckled as if he’d made a very, very small joke, possibly so small that it didn’t exist.

The man reached into his pocket and produced a dowsing compass. He clicked it open and squinted at it. “Truly? Nothing at all?”

Liff nodded.

The man showed the divinometer to one of his compatriots, a tall woman. She shrugged. “Looks like he’s telling the truth, though I’m no better at reading this than you are.”

The mercenaries sat down at the bar. The one with the compass who I’d pegged as the leader spoke. “Food and drink, please.”

Liff disappeared into the back room without so much as a whisper about payment or quantity. When he returned, he served enough for ten men, but the mercenaries finished it in minutes, and Liff had to supply multiple rounds before they seemed satisfied.

I was impressed, to be honest. I thought Liff would run out or fall behind. The appetite of Anthe mercenaries was legendary. They didn’t even seem to be chewing, just tearing off bites and swallowing.

I remembered something else about the Anthe. Despite the dowsing compass, none of them could be mages. Redeyed never were. Therefore, the divinometer wasn’t animated by spellcraft, but by invested magic: it was an artifact.

I wanted it, to be honest. Artifacts were rare, so rare that nobody knew how they were made. Furthermore, a magic divinometer was exactly the kind of thing I could put to use. But stealing from the Anthe was suicidal. Possibly more so than stealing from the Collegium. Picking a redeyed’s pocket wasn’t possible with any amount of legerdemain; supposedly, they could hear a person’s breathing from two hundred paces away, or a person’s heartbeat from twenty paces, and their other senses were just as sharp.

As I watched them, I eventually noticed their appetites slow down. Suddenly, they stood up in unison and flowed out the door. It took Liff a moment to notice the pouch of coins they’d left on the counter. 

I let out a sigh. They’d paid me no mind at all. Perhaps they hadn’t been sent by the Collegium after all? No, that was unlikely. The dowsing artifact was evidence of both Collegium involvement and the idea that they were looking for something.

So they were here for the star, but didn’t have a description of me, despite the fact that I’d been seen by two Collegium mages at the crater. Had the Collegium dismissed me because I was a child? I  _ was _ only fourteen, and I looked a lot younger. But mages were smarter than that. The divinator in particular had been justifiably suspicious of me.

A failure of communication, then? Why wouldn’t they report the suspicious kid they’d seen at the crater? Hm.

The two mages were likely under scrutiny from having failed to retrieve the star. The Collegium was questioning their competence and their trustworthiness. In that sort of situation, to say that they’d seen a  _ child _ , questioned him with the aid of divinometry, verified that he wasn’t in disguise, let him go, and then mysteriously lost the star, would be embarrassing. Especially for the divinator.

That seemed to fit. The mages I’d fooled had taken a hit to their credibility, so instead of sending them, the Collegium had sent Anthe mercenaries, with a powerful artifact instead of a divinator. It was a sensible course of action to take. Redeyed always followed orders, and artifacts couldn't be traitors either.

The important thing was that they didn’t suspect me. I was sort of safe, in the loosest possible sense of the word. As safe as you can be in the vicinity of five redeyed looking for the star you’ve stolen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clairometry is now called divinometry, which I think is a better balance between familiar and unfamiliar.


End file.
